Shuttle XPC SZ170R8 V2: Small but Powerful

Compact, efficient and incredibly powerful if you spring for the right parts, the Shuttle XPS SZ170R8 V2 has a lot going for it. The small form factor of the motherboard does not take away from its power. Even better is its capability as a portable machine.

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Although ECS didn't provide a picture with its announcement earlier today pertaining to its AMD socket FM1 boards, a picture of the A75F-A motherboard has now turned out via a German website. This is the first picture of a production AMD FM1 motherboard to appear and we can't say that we're entirely sold on ECS' design choices.

Although ECS didn't provide a picture with its announcement earlier today pertaining to its AMD socket FM1 boards, a picture of the A75F-A motherboard has now turned out via a German website. This is the first picture of a production AMD FM1 motherboard to appear and we can't say that we're entirely sold on ECS' design choices.

It's amazing how much more information you have at your fingertips once a picture is posted of a new motherboard and now we can do a much more detailed breakdown on what's coming. The most obvious part is the CPU socket with the 950-pin FM1 socket and this is also what seems to be the main reason for AMD's change to its CPU cooler retention mechanism. We saw the split design being demonstrated by ASRock at CeBIT earlier this year and it now makes a lot more sense, as the FM1 socket and the AMD3+ will be sharing the same CPU coolers.

The PWM design is really basic, to the extent that we're almost surprised had we not seen AMD's in-house testing board already. We're looking at what appears to be a 4+1 phase design. The board has a simple 4-pin +12V connector rather than the now almost standard 8-pin one which together with the PWM design is suggesting that we're looking at a fairly power frugal set of CPUs.

The board has a single x16 PCI Express slot, a single x4 PCI Express slot, two x1 PCI Express slots and three PCI Slots. We're not quite sure why ECS has placed them as it has, as if you want to use a dual-width slot in the x4 slot at the same time as using a dual-slot graphics card, then you're out of PCI Express expansion slots.

The board has as we mentioned in our previous news story, five SATA 6Gbps ports and there are also pin headers for what appears to be two USB 3.0 ports, six USB 2.0 ports and a serial and parallel port. Around the back we're looking at a PS/2 port, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out and of course an HDMI, DVI and D-sub connector. There's also a clear CMOS button located here.

Despite being part of ECS' Black Deluxe series the A75F-A only has solid capacitors located near power regulation circuitry and elsewhere on the board we're looking at traditional electrolyte capacitors, somewhat disappointing on a higher-end board these days. Apparently there' support for DDR3 memory up to 1866MHz, at least judging by the silk screening on the PCB. Overall we have mixed feelings about this very first AMD FM1 board, but we'd expect better things to come.